overtraining

csp

Anyone with personal experience? I've read a lot about it, think I have possible signs, but just cannot accept it.

liversedge

I had a bad dose in 2007 after doing a classic "winter peak" plan (going too hard over winter and burning out by the spring). By may I was done in. I was feeling tired all the time, lost my motivation to ride, when I did ride I struggled to match previous bests even though in theory I should have been stronger. I ended up not ridiing for a couple of weeks and then got back on it ... but I lost loads of form doing that. I reckon that year I peaked in April not July .... ah well.

That's just my experience anyway.

DomPro

I've experienced subtle overtraining symptoms. Mainly the drained feeling you sometimes get for a couple days after a few days intensive riding. Found it hard to sleep as well and would wake up early. Not pleasant. Recovered fairly quickly after a few days though.

slunker

Might be going through this myself. Last couple of weeks I can't be arsed and when I do go out my legs seem to be burning even on the easiest rides.

pjm-84

Had it back in October and November last year.

For me the first signs are not hitting your heart rates. I generally peg out about 195bpm but I was struggling to hit 170bpm. Performance was also varied. One session you're be at the front of the group the next you're be at the back. This progressively goes towards being at the back. However my legs felt normal.

Then you stop sleeping. This is really odd because you are tired but you just can't sleep. You lie there clock watching. You're wired. If I got a couple hours a night I was luckly. I started taking sleeping pills but to no avail. 2 would be the dose. I would end up taking 3. Because of the lack of sleep you become moody and short fused. This was pretty bad.

I ended up having 2 weeks away from the bike. I also picked up a cold. I then managed to ride once a week but was totally exhausted and unable to ride for the rest of the week but at least I was sleeping again. In December I caught the Flu so had another 3 weeks off the bike eventually resuming riding in the New Year.

Anonymous

February for me, immune system was shot and got bronchitis.

mattbarnes

I overtrained massively in 2006. I did quite a bit of training over the winter 2005 and into 2006 and when I picked up the pace come the spring, the symptoms started to creep in. I didn't know what it was to begin with and made the mistake of ignoring the signs and kept on beasting myself on a weekly basis. Every time I went out on the bike i was getting slower, my heart rate kept creeping up and my moral took and absolute battering. By June of 2006 I was completely knackered and it took well into 2007 to recover. Even then it was a steady recovery and for the majority of 2007 I was far from 100% fit.

If you think that you are on the brink of overtraining then think carefully about what you are doing on the bike. Speaking from experience, it causes major problems and they are problems that take months to rectify.

liversedge

Interesting blog post by Joe Friel today on overtraining and overreaching.

"A couple of weeks ago I posted a piece about overtraining. I want to make another brief comment about something I alluded to there but didn't flesh out. This will be just a passing thought. I mentioned that you have to overtrain to achieve a high level of fitness but that you also have to stop before going too far. Let me explain that a bit more.

When I do a talk I often ask the audience how many have been overtrained. Almost everyone raises their hands. My guess is that fewer than 5% in any such athletic audience, even with mostly very serious athletes, has truly achieved overtraining. And that's a liberal estimate. It's very difficult to achieve the overtraining syndrome. Accomplishing that requires a superhuman effort to overcome your body's extreme weariness which is a probably a built in mechanism to prevent death or at least bodily harm. I've only known of one athlete in in 30 years of coaching who I believed was really overtrained. It wasn't a pretty sight. He was a pro triathlete who told after he retired that he was never the same athlete again. He raced unspectacularly for three more years following that episode.

I can sense your confusion already. How can you overtrain and yet not be overtrained? Overtraining is a process; the overtraining syndrome is a result. The process of overtraining simply means that you must train at a stress level which would produce the overtraining syndrome eventually. That 'eventually' is poorly defined in the literature. It could be any where from a couple of weeks for an aging, novice athlete to perhaps a dozen weeks for a highly fit, 20-year-old. And to make matters even worse it's a moving target. It might take less stress to achieve the OT syndrome at the start of the training season than it would just a few weeks later when your capacity for stress has increased.

The process of overtraining is also called 'overreaching.' In order to intelligently overreach you must know what your body is currently capable of handling in terms of stress and then exceed that stress by a SMALL amount. Most athletes left to their own devices will try to exceed by as great a margin as possible. You must also know how long you can manage the overreaching stress load before the wheels start to come off (i.e., overwhelming fatigue sets in). I've found nothing better for this than the WKO+ software. I use it to manage the stress loads of the athletes I coach so that we achieve peak performance when we need while avoiding the overtraining syndrome. Even with the software it's still somewhat of a crapshoot as you can tell from this post. But I don't know how I did it before the WKO+ software came on the scene a few years ago. I wouldn't want to go back to that way of coaching again."

csp

Strange, I've got his book and in it he writes about overtraining as something that may come very quickly, if you're not paying attention to the warning signs. He emphasizes the importance of erring on the side of doing too little training rather than too much, throughout the book. He keeps repeating "When in doubt, leave it out".

suze

Been riding like a bag of spanners since the Fred Whitton. I tried to back this up with some more big (50-60 miles) rides and I've felt tired every time I've ridden, especially last weekend. I figured that I'd not rcovered that well.
Speaking to coach friend of mine, he tells me that I should have gone back to base level type rides to recover before trying to continue to build. This week I've done nothing but 1hr recovery rides and the usual SQT at the track. I feel better for it.....

Riding hard every time takes it out of you and without sufficient recovery burn out often results and form rapidly drops off without recovery. Another week of recovery riding and I'll start building up for the White rose.

Joe Friels book explains more about the importance of recovery, and how best to plan more than one fitness peak in the year.

It's only May......It's important to listen to your body, I'm taking a rest period for a couple of weeks. 8) It's better to take it easy for a couple of days than continue to hammer your body, that way I'll be in a better frame of mind to ride.

jos2thehua

I recently also felt I was overtraining, which thus made me revamp my whole training schedule and rethink it. You see, I'm not only an avid cyclist, but a very avid runner. This means I run and cycle nearly everyday together and balancing out the two becomes very difficult. However, right now I'm focusing a lot of my energy on cycling because my track season has recently ended. Though I do still run it isn't at the intensity I do my cycling workouts at. Although, I don't train running as hard I have found that I still try to go really fast while running and to no avail I can barely lift my legs. I had also been feeling very lethargic and this Saturday I even had to take the day completely off of every form.

Now, I have implemented in a lot more recovery and easy days. I have also organized it where I won't be going hard in running and cycling on the same day. I also am forcing myself to actually cycle slow, which I must admit is really hard. Hopefully this will help me to feel stronger and improve more. I might post up my training schedule for you guys to critique soon...

nolf

I find I can tell when I've been overtraining when warming up takes me ages.

E.g If I've been doing a lot of intensity work and long rides sometimes it can start to take me over an hour to go from suffering to actually being able to raise my heart rate enough to get my legs going.

This is my bodies way of saying- take 2 days off asap!!! Which I am doing atm.

pots

i did 3hrs 20 mins yesterday,got back & my legs were aching bad & thought ' have i over trained'.got up this morning,had diarrhoea,got sent home from work & have slept on and off the rest of the day.anyone else experianced this ?

jos2thehua

pots wrote:

i did 3hrs 20 mins yesterday,got back & my legs were aching bad & thought ' have i over trained'.got up this morning,had diarrhoea,got sent home from work & have slept on and off the rest of the day.anyone else experianced this ?

Sounds like you might have just caught a bug. It could be from overtraining but I'm no expert on if overtraining could plausible affect your immune system...

liversedge

on the other hand I've been increasing volume over the last 6 months to 12 hrs per week and no longer take full rest days. I will ride a recovery ride every few days instead. Keeps me fresh without placing stress on my system.

Sometimes going bad is just one of those things. I reckon you need to worry when you have a week of bad days.